As is known in the art, airborne clutter, such as birds, can be dangerous to aviators. Birds can severely damage aircraft and aircrafts engines. Particularly during times of migration, birds can significantly degrade air travel safety and efficient air traffic control.
Birds are often seen as false alarms on radar systems and can easily be confused with weather. There have been prior attempts to detect and classify birds based on reflectivity (radar cross section), Doppler velocity, and Doppler spectrum. These approaches are not believed to have been successful.
In addition, the increased use of wind farms all over the world has created radar system interference. Similar to group traffic, the rotating blades of the wind farm create false alarms on the radar display. Air traffic over such areas often mix with the false alarms and cause confusion. Mitigation methods are usually ineffective and either cause dropped tracks or create false tracks in such areas.
There are a variety of known detection and classification of birds using radar systems. Most such systems use higher frequency bands and higher angular and range resolution than for typical radar applications, such as weather and air traffic control. Such systems are expensive and are not readily integrated with air traffic control systems.
In other known attempts to overcome the above-mentioned problems, auxiliary equipment, such as infra-red cameras and W-band radar, has been used. However, such equipment is not readily integrated with air traffic management systems.